So as you all know I finally started learning Javascript! Which is amazing and has helped me out at work immensely. But like all things that you begin to learn for the first time, it becomes a real pain in the butt until you slowly grasp how everything fits together. But I have been amazed at how quickly those pieces are fitting together once I grasped my first OO programming language. How all these pieces fit together and everything is connected in a sense to complete a task.

My time that I have to spend through The Flatiron School so far has taught me to think of things in a different way. How to think of things at a larger scale to complete a task and bring that skill in a tangible form to the workplace.

So for this first lesson, I will give a brief overview of Javascript and we will go through what I have learned together as I am going over it. So you can better understand how I have gone from writing zero Javascript to hopefully being proficient in the language.

As you probably already know, Javascript is the universally accepted language of the internet. As far as a developer standard you should know how to use it.

“JavaScript is a dynamic, untyped, and interpreted programming language; it is prototype-based and supports both object-oriented and functional approaches.” – The Flatiron School

If you have never written any Javascript go ahead and open up your console and we will try it out together. To open up the console simple right-click anywhere on this screen and select Inspect. Go to the top of the dialogue box and select Console. This area that you are now it is considered a sandbox. If you are using a mac press Command + K and it will clear the screen for you.

In this sandbox environment, you are now able to write and execute code directly in this environment. If you have been following along in my previous posts this is very similar to the IRB environment. A sandbox if you think of like a sandbox, it is an open area where you can do or make anything you can think of, with some limitations.

“Remember how we could play in sandboxes as kids: building castles, moats, and shaping an entire world without worrying about the consequences outside of that world? In programming, sandboxes work the same way: they’re environments that we have complete control over, but whose contents don’t spill into the outside world.)” – The Flatiron School

Inside this Sandbox environment type alert(“Hello World”); And check out the response. You should be given the response below.

This should give you a popup window that prints out the information added to the screen.

Congratulations you have officially written your first lines of Javascript!

“A large part of programming is experimentation — we come up with a hypothesis (how we think something should work) and test it with code.” – The Flatiron School

Javascript is a means of completing a task, and with you as the developer thinking about how things should be done without a clear picture to how it should be done. There are endless possibilities to doing the same thing with Javascript, but it is your job as the developer to chose that path.